(c) Mateo Ivankovic 2017
J.M.J.
January 31, 2017
St. John Bosco
Dear Family of Mary!
“Dear children! Today I am calling you to pray for peace: peace in human hearts, peace in the families and peace in the world. Satan is strong and wants to turn all of you against God, and to return you to everything that is human, and to destroy in the heart all feelings towards God and the things of God. You, little children, pray and fight against materialism, modernism and egoism, which the world offers to you. Little children, you decide for holiness and I, with my Son Jesus, intercede for you. Thank you for having responded to my call.”(January 25, 2017)
We just scratched the surface about Modernism. But next we have Materialism. We all can imagine Materialism to be the love of stuff, the stuff we own and use, collect and hoard. Material things can make us happy, feel safe, feed our egos, but not for long. And living for such things is not really part of the road to holiness. Our Lady wants us to have simple and humble lives so as to be free to love God. Living for the material is not worthy of the human spirit.
But there is also a philosophical understanding of Materialism that goes much deeper. The philosophy of Materialism is actually atheism. The Materialist does not believe in the supernatural, in God, in our souls or in any moral truth. The Materialist believes that only matter exists and that all life, including human life, is a product of the motion of matter. Darwinism assumed this philosophy, saying that living things only act to insure the survival of the species, there is no eternal purpose, just survival of the next generation, because of the impulse or movement of living matter.
Materialism as a philosophy is a very sad reality. Here are some short explanations of Materialism that might help:
The theory that all reality is only matter, or a function of matter, or ultimately derived from matter. There is no real distinction between matter and spirit; even man’s soul is essentially material and not uniquely created by God. In ethical philosophy, materialism holds that material goods and interests, the pleasures of the body and emotional experience, are the only or at least the main reason for human existence. In social philosophy, the view that economics and this-worldly interests are the main functions of society. https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/index.cfm?id=34790
[about Karl Marx] The first of his two key ideas is that of atheistic historical materialism. Like Hobbes, Marx believed that there was no creating God, no plan, design or providence that worked in the universe and as a result there was no metaphysics that could posit knowable, immaterial principles by which and through which the universe existed. For Marx there was only the unstoppable progress of history through the process of matter.
Materialism is the philosophy that reality consists only in the physical and tangible. Materialists seek their ultimate happiness in physical pleasures and possessions. They don’t believe in spiritual goods and they don’t really value human nature. People who embrace materialism often teeter between living life to the fullest and falling into the pit of despair.
The materialist assumption is that the tangible world is all that exists. Nothing exists if it cannot be proven true by science. The assumption is that any claim to truth without scientific evidence is nothing more than opinion. This means that what would be considered true through philosophy or faith is considered mere personal preference by a materialist, including many religious and moral truths. Of course, this view of reality in general has a great effect on a materialist’s view of human nature and human life in particular. http://www.fromtheabbey.com/library/materialism/
We can see this philosophy in action in most of our cultures today. It is a hopeless way of thinking, because ultimately nothing really matters but your fleeting pleasures. There is no afterlife, there is no heaven or God. There is only this life.
How many times Our Lady has tried to help us look to the eternal, to heaven as our future. She came to tell us the God exists. And she constantly directs our eyes to the supernatural, to the life of our souls, to the reality of the afterlife, and our future destiny with God. She does not want us to fall into the Materialist funk, living as if there is no life after death.
So that is Materialism. Yes, it is being distracted by stuff, but even more it is being lied to about our immortal souls and our eternal life with God.
As Our Lady tells us, we must fight this way of thinking!!
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
©Mary TV 2017
